backup and disaster recovery resource center

Evolve IP, a cloud services company, released “The 2015 Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Survey.” Of those responding to the company’s survey, 50.5 percent believe their company is “somewhat” prepared for a recovery, and 4 percent are not prepared at all. Only 45.5 percent of respondents believe they have the proper disaster recovery plan in place and are very prepared for recovery.

BACKUP & RECOVERY-FOCUSED EXECUTIVE COMMENTARY

Q: How do I develop a true leadership team? Coach: In our previous discussion on leadership teams, we examined how a diverse team enhances your ability to come up with innovative ideas or to solve complex problems. Just to recap, issues generally have three dimensions: tactical (task), relational (people) and systemic (big picture).

Many of us have owned our businesses for numerous years and come from the Boomer Generation. Boomers are frugal for the most part, and were raised with dial telephones, three-channel television, and in a single-income family. We saved our leftovers, ate everything on our plates, and the stores were closed on Sundays. We grew up with a mindset of budgets, and when we got out of college it was the ‘70s. We listened to vinyl records, FM radio, and drove an American-made car.

You’ve more than likely heard the saying, “jack of all trades, master of none,” and while in most cases this applies to individuals, it can also pertain to businesses, including solutions providers and MSPs (managed services providers).

The “this” that I’m talking about is the practice that I’ve seen MSPs (managed services providers) and IT consultants repeat many times. Tragically, each repetition costs the MSP and/or IT consultant a ton of cash. The behavior that I’m talking about is the result of success that the MSP has had. Ironically, the more successful small MSPs are, the more rapidly they want to grow, hire more engineers, and enjoy more recurring revenue.

BACKUP & RECOVERY WHITE PAPERS & CASE STUDIES

There are no doubt hundreds of backup vendors, offering various types of backup and recovery methods to Managed Services Providers (MSPs). How does an MSP know which offers the best solution for its customers, and the makes the best business sense as part of its managed services offering?

“We want to serve our patients, not worry about IT,” says Lori Buchman, Practice Administrator with Lincoln Pediatric Dentistry in Lincoln, NE. The IT challenges for the growing dental practice, however, are many. With 34 employees in two locations, one virtualized host and four servers, not to mention HIPAA compliance, it’s imperative that their data be secure and systems are always on.

GRIP I.T., a division of Global Resources Technologies Inc., founded in 1996, provides full-service IT service management for businesses of all sizes. With a focus on improving the functionality of their customers’ IT and business systems, all at a lower cost of ownership, GRIP I.T. seeks to serve their clients in all areas of I.T. The company is based in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

ABOUT BACKUP & DISASTER RECOVERY

A backup is a copy or archive of computer data that can be used to restore the original data if lost. Backups are also used to restore data from an earlier time. They are a simple form of disaster recovery and should be a part of a disaster recovery plan however; a disaster recovery plan should never be just backups alone. Backups can often require significant amounts of data storage space and can be complicated to maintain and organize. Many different methods have been developed to optimize backup procedures, including ways to deal with open files, live data, encryption, compression, and de-duplication. Backup solutions should also include dry runs in order to verify the reliability of the data in the backup.

Disaster recovery is a set of rules, policies, processes, and procedures that organizations set up and follow in order to maintain a running technical infrastructure in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. A subset of business continuity, disaster recovery deals specifically with the IT or technological systems of a business.

Common strategies for data protection include backups made to tape and sent off-site, backups made to disk on-site and copied or made directly to disks off-site, data replication to off-site locations, hybrid cloud solutions that replicate data to on-site appliances and off-site data centers, and high availability systems which replicate data and systems off-site and enable continuous access even after a disaster.

FEATURED BDR PRODUCTS

Datto SIRIS 2 delivers the most aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of any backup, disaster recovery (BDR) and business continuity solution available today. It is the ideal solution for businesses for whom downtime is not an option. SIRIS 2 offers the best protection for a business’s mission-critical applications, delivered via the most robust and flexible technology on the market today.

Designed specifically for the IT channel, Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery helps MSPs offer their clients a hybrid solution for local and cloud backup, data security, and on-demand recovery. Intronis is committed to helping MSPs grow their business, delivering an intuitive solution that eliminates the time-consuming and costly manual administrative processes typically associated with backup and recovery.

Nothing cools like chilled water. Now you can harness the cooling power of liquid in your data center with Cold Front. Cold Front is the perfect solution for tightly packed server rooms or high-density enclosures.

MULTIMEDIA

David Rau, director of sales, Americas for Seagull Scientific, discusses BarTender software at the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit held on May 6 in New Brunswick, NJ. The software enables data from EHR systems to be partitioned and added to a wristband or label — with the option of applying color.

At the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit held on May 6 in New Brunswick, NJ. Joe Howe, business development manager for Cognitive TPG, his company’s printers’ ability to print special security features on plain, thermal paper.